Significance of the Study

10 cognitive knowledge includes the vocabulary mastery, linguistic and discourse knowledge. They also should be motivated in reading. While they are reading, there are changes in the ability and cognitive knowledge they have. The students might increase their knowledge by reading. However, their motivation can also change. It depends on their success in reading. The changes of ability and knowledge in reading can also be affected by the instructions that the teacher gives to the students. Thus, relevant instructions will promote the students’ reading comprehension. b. The Text Texts may give great contribution to the students’ reading comprehension. Those can be categorizeed as easy or difficult ones. Texts which are easy are those that suit to the background knowledge of the readers, the students. It means that when the students can relate between what is being informed in the text and what has been there in their prior knowledge, the texts are easy. If it happens, the students’ reading comprehension is achieved. In contrast, if the students cannot connect the information from the text to their background knowledge, the texts can be said as difficult texts because comprehension is not attained. c. The Topic The topic of the text also influences the students’ reading comprehension. When the students are given a text with uninteresting topic, they may find it difficult to understand although the text was categorized as easy. They even seem unwilling to read the text. On the other hand, the students can understand the text 11 well when they are given a text which is interested and relevant to them Snow, 2002: 26. d. The Activity The activity on reading is closely related to the purpose of the reading. Different aims of reading have different activities. In this study, the activity on reading is aimed at ach ieving the students’ reading comprehension on texts. To achieve the students’ reading comprehension, the activities entail the process of finding the main idea, finding detail information, guessing meaning of difficult words from the context, and creating meaning to the whole text.

3. The Process of Reading Comprehension

As it is mentioned above, reading comprehension is the process of getting knowledge and information by using comprehension skills connected with the prior knowledge of the reader. Understanding the process of reading is closely related to the way how the readers construct meaning from a text. The ways of constructing meaning may vary based on the readers’ reference. According to Hudson 2007: 33 and Brown 2001: 298, there are three types of reading processes, as presented below: a. Bottom-Up Processing Bottom-up processing views the process of reading as phonemic units. The readers construct meanings by scanning from letters to letters. It is continued by recognizing the words from one to another. The process is broadened by associating among phrases, clauses, and sentences. Finally, it is processed into phonemic units representing lexical meaning and attains some comprehension of